Harry Seidler

Harry Seidler (* June 25, 1923 Vienna, † March 9, 2006 Sydney ) was an Australian architect born in Austria.

Life

Seidler was born in Vienna in 1923 as the son of a textile manufacturer. 1938 was forced to flee his family under the Nazi regime and emigrated to Britain.

Here he attended the Cambridge Technical College and later the University of Manitoba in Canada and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. At Harvard, he met in 1945, Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers and Walter Gropius know; at the Bauhaus founder Gropius he was a master student. In 1946, he studied design at the former Bauhaus teachers Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. For a short time he worked with Marcel Breuer in New York.

After completing his studies, he worked in Rio de Janeiro with Oscar Niemeyer. In 1948, he moved in with his parents, who had in the meantime settled in Sydney. In 1949 he opened his own architectural office there. Since 1976 he was a visiting professor at universities in Australia, USA and Europe. In 2000 he was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney.

His first building project, a house for his parents, Rose Seidler House 1948-50 resulting in the northern suburbs of Sydney, aroused his time tempers. Today the building, including the original furniture is a museum owned by the Foundation for Historic Houses of New South Wales.

Seidler's life's work includes many significant buildings in Australia, especially in his adopted hometown of Sydney. In Mexico and in later years in his native Austria, where he was living in 1993 and 2002, the Neue Donau Hochhaus Neue Donau realized in Vienna, he left his architectural mark.

Seidler worked as an architect until a stroke in April 2005. He died at the age of 82 at his home in Killara in the north of Sydney. He is survived by his wife, Penelope, whom he married in 1959, and son Timothy and daughter Polly.

Awards

Retrospective

Office block

MLC Centre, Sydney ( 1972-75 )

MLC Centre ( outbuilding ), Sydney ( 1972-75 )

Hong Kong Club Building, Hong Kong, 1980

Riverside Centre, Brisbane ( 1983-86 )

Castlereagh Centre ( formerly Capita Centre), Sydney ( 1984-89 )

QV.1, Perth, ( 1988-1991)

Mixed use

Hochhaus Neue Donau, Vienna (1999-2002)

Riparian Plaza, Brisbane (1999-2005)

Apartments

Horizon Apartments, Darlinghurst, Sydney ( 1990-98 )

Residential Park - New -Donau, Vienna, 1993

Single-family homes

Quotes

• "Pension is a foreign concept to me. My standard is my former boss Oscar Niemeyer, who still works with 96 as the devil. "
• "Fashion is an enemy of architecture"

• " Internment: The Diaries of Harry Seidler May 1940 - October 1941 ", Unwin Hyman, 1987, ISBN 0868619159, zus with Janis Wilton, Judith Winternitz
• "The Grand Tour. Trip around the world with the view of the architect ", Taschen Verlag 2004, ISBN 3822838713